7. 7
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from under the goose
Anon 15C
9. What learning areas can add
• History
• Science and geography
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4fdxXo4tnY)
•
• Technologies
• The arts
• Health and Physical Education
• Economics and business
• Civics and citizenship
9
Acknowledgement of country - slide 2
When I was in Tasmania for a holiday recently, I came across this plaque, high in the hills of the Karst National Park – a fabulous piece of writing that succinctly and beautifully captures the relationship of Tasmania’s First Peoples with this island. A fitting background for an acknowledgement of Country.
In respect and recognition of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we are standing on here. I would also like to acknowledge and pay respect to any elders that are here today, to acknowledge those who have passed before us and to acknowledge members of the Aboriginal community who are also attending this conference.
In April, my husband and I came to Tasmania for a holiday. We were struck by the visible level of environmental awareness there seemed to be.
But then Tasmania has been at the heart of the debate about the sustainability of environments for decades. What an appropriate place, then for a conference on education for sustainability!
I took lots of photos in April. Of the fabulous places we walked and stayed, of course, but also of odd things that took my fancy, such as cars painted with signs saying things like ‘save our soils’, to company positions on sustainable fishing and lots in between.
I particularly liked these rubbish bins at Mona. They somehow encapsulate what we’re about.
This morning I plan to talk of some of my understandings of how we might think about and plan for education for sustainability.
I particularly want to consider how we might foster in our young people the curiosity and sense of wonder that leads to an ongoing desire to learn and develops the attitudes and dispositions that lead to active commitment to sustainability.
I won’t be dealing with the practicalities here, though.
This is a friend of mine, Marlene Nampitjimpa -a Warlpiri woman from the Western Desert of Central Australia. I have been privileged to go into her Country with Marlene and hear her wisdom.
Once, when we were bogged in the sand and had plenty of time for reflection, she said to me
We need to sing our country up, give it life, to let it be what it wants to be. If we don’t sing up country, it dies, if Country is sick, me and my people are sick
Marlene’s is a holistic understanding of the deep interrelationships between all things:
the enduring responsibility she and her people have for their Country
the place of human kind on this Earth
and the need for constant vigilance and action to protect this Earth
It’s telling to me that it has taken two hundred plus years for westerners to begin to catch on to what first nations people have always known.
For Marlene’s reflection speaks to me of some fundamental principles of education for sustainability:
it needs to be holistic and reflective,
it needs to be purposeful, embedded in all we do and active,
and it needs to be hopeful, informed but still hopeful
Education for sustainability can offer a bit of a challenge for those who favour a 3rs’ approach to teaching and learning or direct instruction alone.
How can learning be engaging and active if the 3Rs are not connected to anything? How can it stimulate the curiosity that is necessary for ongoing learning about the world around us?
I’m not suggesting that we remove readin’ writin and ‘rithmetic from our classrooms, but rather that we rethink how we go about teaching them.
After all, they give us the tools to learn about, measure, collect data, analyse and evaluate arguments and advocate for action for sustainability.
Instead, I’d like to suggest a 3Hs’ approach, one that incorporates the 3Rs but is much broader, is holistic – one that connects hearts, heads and hands.
Tennis player, Caroline Wozniaki described her year recently as having been ‘learningful’ and then immediately questioned the validity of the word. I’m not sure, either, that it exists, but perhaps it should.
By thinking of learning as creating meaningful connections between our hearts, our heads and our hands we are able to engage the whole person and make their education for sustainability as “learningful” as possible
This engagement in the education for sustainability might start by calling on the heart - drawing on emotional responses to what we see around us.
These might be prompted by the beauty of natural environments and the diverse plant and animal life that inhabits them, or the richness of human cultures that are shaped by the environments in which they live.
If we are to engage the hearts of our young people we need to think beyond the bounds of our classrooms. We need to take our students outside wherever feasible and allow them to see, hear, feel and smell living environments.
Increasingly sadly, the heart might be called on differently. The responses may perhaps be prompted by destruction of those beautiful environments, maybe caused by thoughtlessness or ignorance, or by greed of the powerful; they might be prompted by questions about what that destruction means for the future of the Earth and the injustices wrought on communities affected by that destruction.
They may even be elicited by reflective questioning in the classroom. Young people will and must be allowed to consider and question like this. It is important that they then be encouraged not to dwell in the horror of what has and could happen. We must not let them lose hope. Rather we need to help them consider how to respond and in fact even whether a personal response is necessary and fruitful at all times.
Choosing how best to act and where best to act is part of the skills we as educators for sustainability should aim to foster.
Because emotional responses are only a beginning after all, but alone, they are not enough.
Without direction, knowledge, understanding and skills, emotional responses can be well nigh useless.
This is where the head comes in. We need to make sure that:
real and connected learning takes place
we consider the types of knowledge, understanding and skills that will be needed to answer the questions raised and to pose solutions
and deliberately plan to build the capacity to move from being reactive to proactive creatures.
The Australian Curriculum helps with this.
By embedding the sustainability priority in learning areas, real connections are created and those 3Rs, and other learning areas can be made relevant.
When we consider the general capabilities as well, particularly critical and creative thinking, ethical understanding, personal and social capability and intercultural understanding, a framework for education for sustainability comes into view.
For me, the three-dimensional structure of the Australian Curriculum is its most significant strength. The embedded nature of the sustainability priority allows for the development of deep content knowledge and an understanding of how that is relevant for education for sustainability.
The capabilities address what are often referred to 21C skills – the need for creativity, analytical thought, innovation, collaboration, and adaptability. It is in the overlap between learning areas, the sustainability priority and the capabilities that the richest learning can take place.
And it is the questions we pose for our students in this rich space that create the all-important opportunities for reflection on learning.
Just how can the learning areas of the AC contribute to the ‘head’ element of our 3Hs.
Let’s start with history. We can use history to develop understanding of the effects of unsustainable practices on previous civilisations and what we can learn from it.
For example, Shogunate Japan, a once mighty society with carefully managed forestry - it prospered.
And then came the wars and an emphasis on military power and might. What happened to the forestry management? It was ignored and ultimately the society collapsed because of lack of resources.
A clear reminder that economic wellbeing and sustainable practices are interdependent and ignoring one impacts poorly the other and as well as on the sustainability of communities.
We can use science and geography to learn about systems and the importance of balance; the effects of sustainable and unsustainable practices on environments and people; and the importance of wise and equitable resource use.
We can look at the effects of climate change on sea levels and the rise of a whole new class of refugees – climate change refugees. If you haven’t seen it I urge you to look at the video of an impassioned poem delivered at the latest UN climate change conference by a young mother from the Marshall Islands. (reference)
Geography also provides wonderful opportunities to explore diverse cultures, varying world views, and their impacts on environmental well-being
And technologies – it is through understanding and use of technologies that we will be able to find solutions to many of our existing and future sustainability challenges. This could in areas as diverse as food and fibre production, renewal energy, sustainable manufacturing processes and so on.
The role of the arts should be considered –we all know there is a powerful advocacy role for the arts, but what about the sustainability of arts practices themselves? Is it really necessary, for example, to have opera costumes finished in real gold leaf, for ‘authenticity’?
Health and physical education enables students to understand the relationship between healthy natural environments and the well-being of communities and individuals. This creates understanding of the interdependency between social and ecological systems.
Economics and business allow for examination of resource use, the distribution of wealth and how this can affect environments and the growth of environmentally aware business models.
Even if we are being really hard-headed here, it cannot be denied that economy and the environment are symbiotic. This subject can build understanding of the relationship between economic and environmental systems and the need for mutual sustainability. As John Falzon, CEO of St Vincent de Paul says, ‘it’s not bleeding hearts, it’s just bleeding obvious!”
In Civics and citizenship, we can consider the responsibility of citizens for caring for and improving the sustainability of environments.
And it’s important not to forgot those 3Rs – not much in English or mathematics may be tagged as sustainability but they are powerful tools and as such can and should often be used both in the learning for sustainability and as part of building active responses to sustainability challenges.
In English, for example we can develop skills of textual analysis through texts relating to sustainability; we could consider different media responses to a contemporary issue by focusing on something such as old growth logging and we could encourage students to choose topics with an environmental bent for writing or presenting persuasive texts.
In Maths, measurement and statistics will provide great tools in education for sustainability. We could focus any kind of data collection on things such as biodiversity, we could learn about statistics through a sustainability lens and we could interpret data and make predictions for the future based on such statistic.
Remember, if it’s not tagged on the ACARA website, it doesn’t mean that you can’t create your own opportunities, or elaborations that relate to the content description and have a sustainability focus. We need to actively look for the opportunities and embed them in our normal practice. We would benefit from collaborative planning, particularly when considering how to integrate learning for sustainability across learning areas. This is not about adding extra, by including the priority; this is about a way of thinking that sees education for sustainability as a natural fit in a wide range of contexts.
And again, at all times, we need to ask the questions, allow time for reflection, both for ourselves and for our students.
But just as having the heart alone engaged is not enough, neither is engagement of the mind alone enough
So why the hands? A meta-analysis of research across 25 countries of how students best learn and most prefer to learn was published as part of a report by McKinsey and Company in 2012. It found that only 30% of young people felt they learned best in a ‘chalk and talk’ classroom. 58% specifically identified ‘hands-on’ learning or learning by doing, and 62% learning ‘in the field’. (clearly some overlap there!)
Martin Westwell’s research on learning in Science showed that for Australian young people learning by doing was preferred well above other types of learning - and their results improved disproportionately when they spent time in hands on learning.
Beyond that, though, we experience environments through our senses, through our whole being. We cannot adequately build an awareness of and appreciation for natural environments without immersing our students in them as often as possible. It’s through immersion that we elicit emotional response, it’s through getting our hand dirty that we learn. It’s through learning in the field that real awareness, knowledge and understanding is constructed, and it is through structured and purposeful active learning experiences that we can help our students to find real solutions for the sustainability problems they encounter in their learning.
Let’s face it. If we want young people to take action for sustainability, then we must approach education for sustainability actively.
And best of all, its wondrous fun! And what better way to engage and learn?
But enough – alone? Lots of doing, no connections to the big questions? Not enough
In the Wizard of Oz, it could be said that Dorothy was the only one who was a whole person.
The other characters were deeply flawed. We have one without a heart, one with a headpiece filled with straw and another who lacked the courage to act.
It was the whole character, the one with the heart to feel, the head to reason and the courage to act who brings resolution for the other three, she is the one who makes them whole.
So what about all 3Hs together? A key principle of education for sustainability, for me, is that it be holistic – that it engages our hearts, our heads and our hands together to create whole knowledge, whole understanding and whole people.
It is through whole engagement that curiosity will be stimulated, that questions will be asked that answers can be found and that the future can be considered fearlessly and with hope.
Because we will have young people who want to keep on learning, who have the capacity to think creatively and analytically, who have the courage to be innovative and who have the desire to collaborate in action for a more sustainable future.
This is my neighbour, Julia and three of her chickens. Julia brings me delicious fresh eggs, carefully labelled 0, 1 and 2 to indicate their age. She comes and sits on the back step with me and asks about things in our garden or the birds she sees and hears.
During one of our musings together, I asked her about whether she learns anything at school about the environment. She told me: ‘Aw - Kindies and Y 1 do the school garden and that’s about it.’ Pushed a bit, she did acknowledge that after Year 1 some ‘stuff happened in the classroom.’
She is, though, an endlessly curious individual, full of questions, seeking answers and proposing her own solutions to the issues of her own environment. And, she chose her parents well.
She lives in an environment where she can’t help but be stimulated. She works in the vegetable garden, she has 4 beloved chooks, she is understanding the benefits of composting. The family have a hive for native bees. There is a swimming pool that has been turned into a pond, filled with native fish that can be used as a biobank if needed – still swimmable, as it is a perfectly balanced ecosystem. And no, this is not in Nimbin - this is a very conservative Sydney suburb.
You probably know someone like Julia. They say that everyone has a teacher who inspired them; interestingly every teacher has students who inspire them. Julia inspires me – with young people like this, we can have a hopeful future.
Let’s ensure that all our young people get what Julia is lucky enough to have. Because they need it, we need it, our communities need it and our Earth needs it
